


The Past Lingers as We Go On

by BookWerm



Series: Short Torchwood Stories [5]
Category: Torchwood
Genre: Angst, Comfort, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, Temporary Character Death - Jack Harkness, Whump, all of the torchwood team, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-22
Updated: 2021-01-22
Packaged: 2021-03-14 15:15:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,872
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28922718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BookWerm/pseuds/BookWerm
Summary: One day, Ianto comes into work and something is... off.Cue hurt and whump.Followed by soft happy.
Relationships: Jack Harkness/Ianto Jones
Series: Short Torchwood Stories [5]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1749835
Comments: 7
Kudos: 59





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to Nick/princessoftheworlds for help with formatting, spacing, quotation marks, and paragraph breaks and a first reaction to my story!  
> Special thanks to GnomeWithALaptop for word choice help, getting rid of too many "was"s and "had"s and making the story more active and less passive. Also for helping get rid of things or expand on them when they were confusing, giving things their own sentences to make it more dramatic and impactful, and giving personality to charcter's dialogue. And for the reaction to my story!  
> Special thanks to phoenixash749 for a lot of help with basic grammar: prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, spacing, and paragraph breaks and a reaction to my story!  
> Here is a link to phoenixash749 because they do not have an AO3 account: https://phoenixash749.tumblr.com/

It was a regular morning for Ianto Jones. Rain pounded the pavement outside, and Weevils swarmed  in the sewers below.

Ianto walked through the cog door, alarm blaring as Myfawny shrieked overhead. He had two new bags of coffee beans with him and a smile on his face. 

He glanced up toward Tosh’s desk, and his face dropped a little. 

She was usually here by now. Like him, Tosh was an “on time” sort of person, not someone who would show up an hour late, like Ianto had today; his late arrival was due to the fact that the best store for coffee beans had run out, and so he’d driven to the other end of the city to buy some more. He dropped the coffee beans off by the coffee machine, he’d come back to them in a moment. Instead,he decided to ask Jack if he had seen Tosh. 

Striding up the stairs, he listened to the whir of computers and opened the door to Jack’s office. The contents of his desk were strewn across the floor and a pervasive burning smell filled the room. 

Ianto drew his gun, took a step further into the office, and a sharp pain hit his neck.

He crumpled to the ground.

t-t-t-t-t-torchwood 

He woke up slowly, squeezing his eyes shut against the pounding ache in his head. 

It took only a moment before he remembered – danger. 

Ianto sat up, taking everything in. A dimly lit cell about the size of his bedroom back home surrounded him, and he wasn’t alone. He shivered. Across the room sat Owen, his wrists and ankles straining against cold steel cuffs. The blood on him suggested he’d landed a few blows on someone who could bleed. Good on Owen for using the fact that he was dead to his advantage – there was no knocking a corpse out with chloroform — or a taser for that matter... which led to the smell that was still there but fainter. His heart pounded faster - Jack lay, slumped in a heap against the right wall of the cell, shadows covering most of him in the dark room . Dark purple and black lines spiderwebbed across Jack’s neck in a telltale electrical burn, one that Ianto now noticed he had on his own neck as well. He didn’t seem to be awake yet. 

Over to his left were Tosh and Gwen. Gwen’s knuckles blossomed with bruises, but she hadn’t been chained up like Owen had. And Tosh, thankfully, appeared to be fine, at least compared to the rest of them. 

In between Tosh and Gwen was a door. It had no handle, no window, and could barely even be recognized as a door at all but for the faint outline of light surrounding it.. 

As soon as Ianto started looking around, Owen noticed him stirring and waved awkwardly, what with his hands cuffed together. He was smiling grimly. 

“I see you’ve finally come around,” he said wryly, and then he softened slightly. “Are you alright?” 

“All in one piece,” Ianto said. ”But I’ve got a hell of a headache. What about the others?” 

As he said this, Tosh began to stir. 

Looking at Tosh, Owen began, “Don’t know yet. You were the first to wake up but the last to get here.” 

Tosh pushed herself up off the ground and squinted, “Owen?” 

“Yeah, Tosh?” 

“Where are we?” 

“Haven’t the foggiest.” 

And then footsteps began echoing outside the door, closer and closer. 

Everyone stared at the door, breath caught in their throats. 

Ianto stood up and backed against the wall, unsure whether to lunge forward and attack when the door opened, or to stay as far away from it as possible. 

The door opened.

A giant, oily black beetle head appeared in the opening.

Ianto lunged. 

He grabbed the giant insect’s head and was about to give him a good old jab when a hot, sharp pain touched his side, and spread throughout his whole body. His body shook, he couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move, and a burning smell came on full force. 

He slumped to the ground and watched helplessly as they dragged Gwen away. 

“Ianto? Ianto? Can you hear me?” Jack’s voice drifted out of the endless void that was surrounding him. 

Everything gradually grew louder and louder until Ianto’s hands snapped up to his ears and he heard a sigh of relief from beside him. 

Jack murmured, “I was worried about you.” 

He carefully sat up to find the others clustered around him, Owen having shuffled over as well. Everyone except Gwen.

Ianto breathed deep, and then flinched. He tried again, more shallowly, clutched his head, and began to speak.

“What do we know?” asked Ianto. “And how long have I been out?”

Jack looked to Tosh, so Ianto did too.

“I was heading to Jack’s office to tell him about this news report I found on - yes, Owen, I should have noticed your ruined medbay - when I smelled burning coming from his office. When I looked in there, Jack was unconscious and restrained on the floor, and I could barely get a shot off when I was hit too.”

Jack continued,”I never got a chance to wake up in my bunker; first thing I knew I was here, with a terrible headache.”

Owen said, “And our best guess is you’ve been out thirty minutes.”

“But what about the beetle?” said Ianto.

“Based on Owen’s description, I’d say we’re probably dealing with Quls. They’re usually peaceful, fiercely loyal. But they have a thing for vengeance. I’ve only ever had one encounter with them before, and it ended badly.” Jack added.

“How badly?” said Tosh.

“The Qul died. I.. may have shot him in the head” At the looks from the others, he exclaimed, “It wasn’t my fault, really.”

Owen straightened up a bit.

“Well, Captain It’s-Not-My-Fault, any bright ideas on why they took us as well? What they’re doing to Gwen? How to get out of here?” Owen’s eyes, though dead, were a bit like fire.

“I don’t know yet,” Jack responded, contrastingly authoritative and calm to Owen’s rage. “But we will find out, and we will get out of here.”

Ianto, Tosh, and Jack spent the next few hours walking around their small cell, looking for any cracks in the hard material, any clues as to where they were.

Just as Ianto began to yawn, the door clanged open, and a thin black claw shoved Gwen in. The door shut immediately after.

Ianto stood in shock for a moment before Owen shouted at them, “Can’t you see she’s hurt? I’m the doctor here, and I’m handcuffed. Help her!”

He was beyond right. The edges of Gwen’s hair were singed, bruises covered her bare arms, and what little they could see of her stomach was covered in blood and cuts.

Jack was suddenly right next to her and was feeling for a pulse. “She’s alive, but the pulse is slow.”

“Probably from all the damn shocks,” Owen said.

“There doesn’t seem to be any cuts that are still bleeding and no injuries to anything major as far as I can tell.”

“With what we have now, there’s not much we can do here. We have to get out and get some real medical attention.”

Ianto cut in, “Why are they doing this? Are they going to take another of us?” He tried to keep his voice calm and steady, but failed, and his voice was a little higher with each word.

“They’re not going to,” said Jack. The look on his face almost made Ianto shiver, but he knew it wasn’t directed at him. “I’m not going to let them.”

They weren’t given any food or water, and it seemed to have been hours. Although they were on constant guard, Tosh still fell asleep, and Gwen thankfully only woke up for small bits at a time, too pained to do anything but make low noises. 

And then, finally, another Qul opened the door (or maybe the same one, Ianto couldn’t tell) and went straight for Ianto.

But It couldn’t get there. Jack stood in its path, planted, solid, unyielding.

The Qul made a series of demanding clicking noises, and then surprisingly, Jack clicked back, just as fiercely.

The Qul reached around Jack, and Jack pushed it away, grabbing the weapon that had been used to shock each of them and slammed it against the Qul’s thick carapace.

It did nothing.

Instead the Qul twisted Jack’s arm, took the weapon back, and shocked him with it.

He lay twitching on the ground for a moment, and then stopped, his eyes glassy.

The Qul reached out for Ianto again, and Ianto elbowed them. He scrambled out the doorway, feeling the rough floor of the hallway, heart beating faster, so close to freedom. He skidded to a stop at a fork in the hallway, pausing just a moment too long - a claw grabbed him by his shirt. Ianto flew backwards back into the cell with a thud, and the weapon was pointed threateningly at him when he heard a familiar gasp coming from the floor.

The Qul heard it too.

They looked inquisitively at the once-again alive Jack, clicked, and then carried him out of the cell, against Tosh and Ianto’s protests and Owen’s threats.

It was a long hard wait for Jack to come back.

It was punctuated with screams. 

They didn’t have to think much to know they were Jack’s. 

Ianto’s heart felt like it was ripping itself apart listening to the screams. Nothing made him feel this way in a while , and though he had a different relationship with Jack than the others, he couldn’t help but see the same look in their eyes.

The Quls were going to pay.


	2. Chapter 2

Jack had succeeded in stopping the Qul from taking Ianto away, as far as he knew, and for that he was glad. But as he fought to get free from the Qul’s grasp, he couldn’t help the sinking feeling of dread. Whenever someone found out about his immortality, it always had a chance of going incredibly wrong. He shivered as his wrists tingled with the memory of chains and the thick heat of a boiler room, and he remembered shock after shock at the mercy of Torchwood.

Jack spoke quickly in Invcian, the main Qul language. “Listen, they had nothing to do with it - I’m the one who killed Tttn, not them. Do whatever you want with me, but please let them go.”

The Qul replied, “I am Kttf, offspring of Ttn. They were killed by Torchwood, and I will get revenge on all of Torchwood. Even if you will never die.”

Kttf dragged Jack into a cavernous room ahead and dropped him with a thud that reverberated through Jack’s bones. A large, sharp rock lay next to the wall and Kttf raised it above him before agony ripped through Jack’s chest. He let out a gurgled scream that continued onwards as two more Quls arrived and poured what felt like acid into his wound.

He struggled and let out a flailing punch that squarely connected with Kttf’s right eye.

A rattling shriek came out of them, and one of the other Quls stabbed him in the eye in return, and all went black.

Ianto had been pacing across the whole fourteen feet of the cell over and over again for hours. He had exhausted every possible thing he could think of for how to get out of here, but he had to have something to do, anything to distract from the screams that just wouldn’t stop.

Finally, after who knows how long, Jack’s body thudded dully on the floor and the door slammed shut. Blood covered him from head to toe, but as always he had no injuries to be seen. Ianto caught him, held his head in his lap, and cried. “I’m so sorry, Jack; I’ve got you. I’ve got you.”

After a minute or so, Jack gasped his way back to life in Ianto’s arms, holding onto him tightly.

He lay fighting for breath for just a little while longer than usual, time that to Ianto, stuck out like a sore thumb.

He let out a quiet sob, lay there for a minute, and then stood up as if shaking some dust off. “Alright, I’m back. Is Gwen alright?”

Owen and Ianto stared at him with disbelieving eyes before Owen answered.

“She’s gotten a little worse; she might have bruised ribs. She’ll be alright with an ice pack, a few weeks rest, and a hell of a lot of pain meds. What about you?”

“What about me? I’m fine, see?”

Ianto sighed, and Owen began to move past it.

“Did you see anything out there to help us escape? Or better yet, to get these stupid cuffs off?”

Jack began to grin. “There’s a transporter pad in the second room on the right. And they have a weakness.”

The next time Kttf came in to grab one of them, they were ready.

Owen stood by the door, and as soon as it opened, he swung his handcuffed hands directly into their left eye.

Tosh kicked into their abdomen, and Kttf began to back away, making an uncanny screeching noise. She delivered another sharp kick, and the Qul fell down with a loud thump.

Around their thorax, they had a pouch, and Tosh swiftly removed the keys and handed them to Jack, who unlocked Owen’s cuffs.

They all hurried to the transporter pad before Kttf could get back up. Ianto noticed their belongings in the corner, including his gun, and while Jack reprogrammed the teleport coordinates, Ianto went back and shot Kttf three times in the head.

Back at the Hub, it was now ten at night. They doubled the security measures, scared to death that something like this would happen again, that they would come back. Owen took care of Gwen the best he could and called Rhys to decide what was the best thing to be done.

Ianto kept trying to get Jack to slow down, to talk to him, but he seemed to have immediately slipped back into his fearless leader role, making sure Gwen was doing alright, helping Tosh with the security and plans for when the other Quls came back, and absolutely avoiding any serious talks about how he was doing with anyone.

It was only when Jack asked for another coffee that Ianto put his foot down

“You need sleep.”

“How can I sleep when I know any minute they could come back and take you?”

“You’ve done the best you can, Jack. Everyone’s exhausted — it’s three in the morning. We all need a break. We can take shifts if that makes you feel any better. And yes, I do mean take shifts, not just you taking all of them.”

At this point, Gwen spoke up from her spot on the cot they’d set up where they thought she was still asleep. “I think I hear something.”

There was a banging sound on the cog door. 

The thuds were periodic but not mechanical. They kept getting louder.

Tosh, Owen, Ianto, and Jack gathered together, weapons drawn.

“What should we do?” said Tosh.

“I say we should open the door and shoot their bug-eyed brains out,” said Owen.

Ianto looked pointedly at Owen and then at Jack.“Do you want them wrecking everything in here?”

Jack looked thoughtful. “If we stay right here, they might just break down the door. But if we open the door, they could ruin priceless information and artifacts before we kill them.”

Tosh’s eyes flashed with inspiration. “I have an idea.”

Jack and Owen took the invisible lift up to the Millennium Center and carefully, quietly, walked the route down to the cog door from the tourist office.

The alarm started blaring, and the door began moving, catching the Quls’ attention as Jack and Owen crept up behind them and fired their guns at the aliens’ eyes.

This resulted in chaos. Instead of dying immediately or laying on the ground and clutching at their eyes, they raced on stumbling legs, clicking madly, directly at the two humans.

The gun Jack was holding clicked empty. He tightened up and got ready to punch his way out of this or die trying.

Suddenly, gunshots rang out, and both the Quls dropped dead. Tosh and Ianto were behind them, guns raised.

Jack grinned and ran over to Tosh and Ianto, giving them a huge hug.

“We did it! It’s over!” Tosh exclaimed, relieved.

“Really, it’s a first for alien species to be underestimating us,” said Owen.

“Just to be safe, let’s bunker down in the Hub for a few days, right?” said Ianto.

“And I want every one of you living people who can sleep to get a full eight hours for once. I’ll keep watch. We’ve all been through an ordeal today,” Owen said. Quieter: “-And I for one can’t get those screams out of my head.”


	3. Chapter 3

The next day, after they had all slept in their different nests of blankets in the Hub and were working on cleaning up and documenting what they had been through, Ianto went up to Jack, determined to talk to him about what had happened.

Jack hadn’t participated in writing down his account of the events, choosing instead to stay locked away in his office for hours.

But now he was out and about in the Hub, eating food and looking at the UFO sighting Tosh had found, and Ianto just couldn’t waste the opportunity.

“Jack?”

“Hm?” he said, distracted.

"Are you doing alright? I know a lot has happened."

Jack said nothing, smiled unconvincingly at Ianto, and walked away.

He tried again at lunchtime.

Everyone was gathered together, so it was the perfect time to get Jack to let it all out, that he wasn't doing fine.

Gwen complained slightly about her injuries but did much better now that Rhys was around, smiling and talking with the others, even sitting up and eating with them. Jack winced when Gwen made a comment about how she was having nightmares, and Ianto butted in, "Have we ever considered recruiting a therapist for Torchwood?"

Owen, sitting in the corner without food, scoffed.

Ianto glared at him. "I'm serious, we all need-"

"What I think we need is to relax," Jack interrupted. "Who's up for a round of basketball?"

Ianto sighed and put his head in his hands as Owen, Tosh, and Jack began their third round of Speed. He had to stage an intervention.

At dinner, after Jack had retired to his office for the evening, Ianto gathered everyone to his desk in the archives. 

"Alright, are you going to tell us why you have us down here in the freezing bloody archives?" Owen asked.

"It's about Jack."

The next day, they finally felt safe enough to go outside. Jack had gone out while they all ate some takeout, so they waited together at the table for him to get back.

As he walked into the room, they all looked at him. He looked down at the Chinese food and looked back at them. “What?”

“Jack, you’ve been avoiding us. Don’t say you haven’t; we’ve noticed,” said Gwen.

“And Ianto here thought we should have a bloody talk about it, which although I despise the idea, may actually do you some good,” said Owen

Jack’s eyes, hard and resistant against the very idea, softened, and he dropped into his chair. “I’m so sorry that all of this happened to you. It’s my fault. I have so many loose ends, and I knew that the past would come back to bite me in the ass.”

“Jack, it’s not your fault,” said Tosh. “None of this is your fault.”

Gwen started, “It’s not your fault that they hurt you, and it’s not your fault that they hurt me. It’s not your fault.”

He looked up, but his eyes said he still didn’t believe it.

“And Jack,” said Ianto. “You don’t need to pretend it didn’t hurt. What they did to you. It was much worse than how they hurt Gwen, just because you’re you, and you’ve been acting like how we got hurt is all that matters. But you’re hurt too. Your pain is important too. We’re here for you.”

Ianto looked around, and the others followed suit with his words.

Tosh said, “I’m here for you, Jack.

Gwen nodded. “Me, too.”

And finally, even Owen spoke up, “If you need me, I’ll be there.”

They sat in silence for a moment before all suddenly rushing up and surrounding him in a big group hug.

Later, after they had finished their work for the day, and Owen and Tosh had gone home, Gwen came up to Jack.

“You know, Jack, just because you come back without the scars doesn’t mean they aren’t there. They’re in your head, and it feels terrible. But you know what? We can heal together.”

She gave him a long hug and then left, along with Rhys.

And then there were two.

Ianto and Jack walked side by side to Jack’s little hidden bunker, saying nothing but feeling the silent companionship.

After they climbed down the ladder, Jack collapsed onto his bed, and Ianto soon followed.

Jack’s back was to Ianto’s stomach, and they simply lay together in the warmth for a time that seemed both endless and short.

Ianto was the one to break the silence.

“Jack, I just want you to know, I’ll always be there for you, in all the ways that count, for as much time as we have. I care about you; I love you.”

When he finished speaking, he felt Jack trembling and was confused before realizing Jack was sobbing. Ianto held Jack tighter and simply said,” I’m here.”

For many weeks afterwards, Ianto slept in Jack’s bed with him, just being there, helping him through the nightmares, the memories, the emotions. It helped Ianto as well, because, like Owen said, he still couldn’t get those screams out of his head.

The pure agony and desperation that must have been to have caused Jack, usually nonchalant about pain, to make those sounds, had dug its claws into Ianto’s heart and wouldn’t let go.

So, carefully, in the dark, night after night, they calmed each other’s fears. 

He was there so much that Owen suggested they should move in together. And they did.

The small, cramped space was just not built for two people in the long term, so despite his misgivings about being away from the Hub for any length of time, Jack moved in with Ianto.

Jack was a good cook, and often Ianto woke up to the smell of eggs and bacon.

And although Jack could be extremely messy when it came to office work, he kept everything that he touched in the apartment clean and learnt where everything went.

Ianto gave Jack a kiss before they went to work, even though they commuted in the same car.

Sometimes Jack traced the scars that weren’t there and the bruises that had healed in seconds, lost in memory and Ianto stood there with him, remembering.

They all could heal together.


End file.
